


London Rain

by paraTactician



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-18
Updated: 2011-10-20
Packaged: 2017-10-24 18:29:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/266552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paraTactician/pseuds/paraTactician
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years after the world returns to normal, Dave takes Rose on a short vacation, for reasons not even he quite understands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. everybody wants me to sing

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't actually written anything new for fandom since the end of the HSO, and the need was on me. So I hope you like Dave and Rose, because that's what you're getting! (To those who _don't_ like Dave and Rose, I'm sorry; read this and maybe you'll at least understand why I do. I'll do something different next time, though, I promise.)
> 
> This is not really a 'chaptered' fic per se, I've just cut it in the middle because I'm still tightening up the second half. Part two should go up within a couple of days.
> 
> Enjoy!

“They’re _looking_ ,” she says, quiet in his ear, though she sounds more amused than anything.

“Course they’re fucking looking,” he fires back, side of the mouth like he’s James Cagney, or alternatively like he’s just been to the dentist and half his face is solid rubber. “Do you _know_ how pretty I am?”

Sadly, she’s right, they really are. It’s not even the usual paranoid shiver of intrusion most everyone gets in these situations. Heads genuinely are turning, conversations are faltering, remarks are being poorly concealed behind hands or napkins. His favourite option is (a): _hot damn, check out that guy in the shades, motherfucker’s so swag he put me off my filet mignon_. He’d settle for (b), because Rose Lalonde is nineteen and perfect, big violet eyes and a little dress to match, skin like cream and a tiny smile that says _you can touch me if you like, but you will almost certainly die_ ; she’s got one hand on his sleeve, white on crushed crimson like a shitty vampire paperback, and right now he could punch a speeding train and come off best. But somewhere in his gut he knows it’s (c). _Goodness, they could be brother and sister._

“Table for two, sir?” says the maître d’, and Dave valiantly resists the urge to say _nah brah, the rest of the team’s right behind us_ , because tonight that’s not the point; tonight he is taking it seriously.

* * *

He still feels a little bit guilty about the way he sold it to John. If there’s one thing the man can’t resist, it’s philanthropy.

TG: hey dude meant to say  
TG: im dragging lalonde off to parts foreign for a few days  
TG: get her out of that goddamn stupid mystery mansion before she goes completely fruitloop   
EB: oh man, that’s great! i get really worried about her, she must be so lonely.  
EB: i mean, i know she’s kind of used to it by now.  
EB: and i know she’s got us.  
EB: but still!    
TG: oh gee thanks thats real fucking considerate  
TG: shedding crystal tears for the poor neglected hothouse flower  
TG: you realise ive got precisely dick to do in this apartment but grind up stunts and flood the net with delirious beats   
EB: but... that’s all you ever did anyway.    
TG: not the point  
TG: what do i gotta do john  
TG: how do i make you feel my pain  
TG: hold it there imma go get the gin bottle and the complete works of sylvia fucking plath  
TG: maybe knit you a horrorterror of your very own to hold  
TG: ill punctuate my goddamn sentences if thats what it takes  
TG: pulling out all the stops here  
TG: or i guess putting them back in but yeah   
EB: bluh whatever dude, i never got why you and rose didn’t just move in together in the first place.  
EB: living with jade is awesome!  
EB: i mean, i have to do all the cooking, because she’s terrible.  
EB: and most of the cleaning.  
EB: but it’s so much nicer having someone else around, seriously!  
EB: turns out having a sister is pretty much the best.    
TG: eh  
TG: i can do without a sniffy bookwitch all in my crib 24/7 thx  
TG: dont really want to get home after a hard day being fucking incredible and find shes like rearranged all my dvds  
TG: theyre all shelved by literary allusion or camera angle or something retarded and i cant find shit  
TG: david what kind of a cinematic library do you call this  
TG: not a single example of the austere aesthetic of influential japanese director yasujiro ozu  
TG: how am i supposed to construct stylistic parallels between the lord of the rings super mega double extended goes on for fucking ever edition and a staggering quantity of late nineties porno   
EB: oh my god, you don’t actually have porn in your flat, do you?? gross!    
TG: no john  
TG: my body is a temple  
TG: i have sworn the fivefold vow and become one of the enlightened brotherhood  
TG: never again will i get fucked up on cheap lager by myself  
TG: eat microwave dim sum with a couple of biros  
TG: or jerk it to the underrated turn of the millennium classic attack of the fuck vixens  
TG: seminal is the word believe you me   
EB: la la la, i am not hearing any of this because it is just so awful.  
EB: tell me about your holiday plans.    
TG: oh yeah right  
TG: well basically this is an intervention  
TG: im saving lalonde from herself  
TG: and by herself i mostly mean bombay sapphire  
TG: she wanted to go somewhere quote cultured unquote  
TG: specified it had to have at least three museums and a park with wrought iron benches  
TG: so i figured london  
TG: theyve got assloads of old shit there right  
TG: plus i almost speak the fucking language which saves some effort   
EB: oh wow, that is so cool!!  
EB: i think london is a really good idea.  
EB: i mean, it’s basically like america, but older.  
EB: and dirtier.  
EB: and they’ve got the british museum, and that big tower where they used to behead people, and i think there’s a castle?  
EB: and everyone’s very polite, and it rains all the time!  
EB: she will love it.    
TG: yeah im gonna be bored as fuck but nm  
TG: guess i can always start a riot  
TG: say i was trying to get a feel for the local culture   
EB: hahaha!  
EB: don’t actually do that.  
EB: i am sure you guys will have so much fun, it’ll be really good for you to spend some time together! 

Misdirecting John Egbert was about as much an achievement as pissing off Karkat Vantas had been – five points on Kongregate at best – but Dave felt he’d done it right, left no traces. What could be more natural than a concerned brother trying to shake his ectosister from a bad case of the juniper woegothics by getting her some authentic London smog, bring the absence of colour back to her cheeks? A day spent wandering round the Assyrian galleries, then tea and scones in the café. Shopping on Oxford Street. A Shakespeare play in the evening, something robust and cheerful, like _Richard III_. It all sounded homely and plausible and like he had a plan, which he didn’t, in the slightest. All he knew was that between half and three-quarters of the average waking day was now being spent on thinking about Rose Lalonde, in scenarios ranging from the blissfully innocent to the distinctly questionable, and that once he went to sleep and his brain switched over to the late-night encrypted satellite channels things got frankly outrageous, and it was pissing him off. They talked most evenings on Pesterchum, the same dumb sniping conversations they’d always had, like they were both still thirteen and Sburb had never happened; but every time she signed off he’d sit there for five or ten minutes at his computer, staring blankly at her lavender text, painfully hard and weirdly miserable.

There were a bunch of different explanations for this. It could be hormones. Dave was a nineteen-year-old virgin, since he was fairly sure none of the stuff with Terezi had counted, and hence a thermonuclear warhead of untamed lust. Rose was one of the only two girls he talked to on a regular basis; and while he’d be lying if he said Jade had _never_ made a cameo appearance in his fantasies – often starring alongside Rose herself, in fact – mostly he just wanted to give her a hug. She didn’t fuck with his head the way Rose did. When he thought about getting home and finding his bed already occupied, which he did, well, most days he got home, come to think of it, there was never any doubt who the occupant would be, or how she would smile at him, or how she would sit up and let the sheet fall away and reach out an arm towards him without saying a word. But maybe this was just, you know, familiarity breeding – no, hang on, that was contempt. Familiarity breeds near-continuous boners? Nah. Point was, maybe he just needed to get out and meet some other women.

But they wouldn’t be Rose, and deep down he knew it would be useless. So one morning he’d sat down with a mug of strong coffee and considered it logically, trying to block out both the desire and the helpless, blazing tenderness that swept through the hollows of his chest whenever she crossed his mind for more than a second. He needed to be around her, and no-one else, not the four of them like normal, so he could get a handle on whether it was her or just his dick that was giving him a permanent -4 to Coherent Thought, not to mention inflicting Erotic Daydream status (save ends, if you’re lucky). It needed to be neutral territory, or the experiment wouldn’t be fair; plus her house creeped him the fuck out. That meant going away together. A vacation. He was bored of America anyway. Europe was the obvious choice, but Europe was risky and laden with connotations. Inviting a girl to Paris, or Florence, or Rome, was basically the same as presenting her with a square of gilt-edged card reading _I should be most grateful for the opportunity to fuck you senseless at your earliest convenience, RSVP_. And then he’d thought of London.

London, by virtue of being grey and damp and collectively repressed, maintained a certain ambiguity. Young lovers didn’t write their names on padlocks and clip them to the gates of Hyde Park. No-one had ever filmed _Last Tango in London_ , largely because Marlon Brando would have spent the entire movie in a waxed jacket, eating steak-and-ale pie mournfully and sneezing. He could sell the whole thing as a respectable cultural venture, rather than a squalid excuse to breathe Rose’s perfume and watch her drink coffee and maybe accidentally see her in her bra. She wouldn’t believe him, of course, she never did, but she wouldn’t _dis_ believe him either, which was the crucial part. Paris would make her smirk; London would intrigue her. She’d go along with it if only to see what he had in mind. Maybe he’d read up in advance, drop some comments about how much he was looking forward to the Elgin Marbles. Maybe he’d buy her a parasol.

* * *

The flight from JFK took seven hours and she did crosswords the whole way. Dave kept his headphones on and stared fixedly at a point just below the pop-down electronic map with its outsized plane inching along the fat dotted line to Britain. Looking at her was always a mistake, but most of all when she concentrated. Rose doing a puzzle, hair slanting either side of her pale face, eyes slightly narrowed, sometimes raising the pen to her mouth to gnaw delicately on its cap, could stop his heart faster than a bullet, and with considerably less mess. They talked once, when dinner arrived on its plastic trays.

“Oh, how cute! Look, they’ve whipped up a sort of little tribute to moussaka. An _homage_ , if you will. I wonder what they used for the eggplant? It’s quite convincing at a distance. Be careful, it’s – yes, it’s hot. Have some water.”

“I like the way they label this fucking wet wipe in like nine languages. _Cleansing hand towel. Towelette douchant des mains. Wasserwipe._ You picture all these poor fucking Swedish dudes getting their meal, being like, oh shit, what am I meant to do with this square of moist paper that smells kind of lemony? Is it dessert?”

“The bread roll would probably be quite nice if they hadn’t left it in a corpse locker overnight. Can I dip it in your coffee to reanimate it?”

“Fuck off! Shove it under your arm for thirty seconds, or breathe on it, or something. I don’t want bits of cavity foam floating in my hot black pisswater.”

“No, God forbid I should recklessly endanger the fresh-roasted quality of a fellow traveller’s transmission fluid.”

“I’m serious as cancer, girl. I ain’t touched caffeine since breakfast and I’m this far off a Java runtime error. If I drop dead right here you’re flying the plane.”

“This salad is limp, illogical, and disturbing in a number of ways. I’m not sure I can bear to contemplate it any longer. We shall shovel black earth upon its hideous alien geometries and pray future generations don’t return to dig it up. What’s behind the third door? Oh, cheesecake.”

“Shit, for real? You don’t want that, too many calories. I’ll take it off your hands.”

“Retract your grasping paw before I spork it. I will not suffer a single one of these calories to be taken from me. They are mine, and I love them like my tiny edible children.”

“Jesus. Don’t threaten a sporking unless you got the cojones to go through with it. You ever seen what happens to a man when those shitty little plastic tines snap off inside the wound? My sergeant ate a hollow-point slug to get away from the pain, everything north of his nose just kinda drifted away on the Khe Sanh breeze.”

* * *

They stayed in a hotel a little way out of the centre, and shared a room, because after all Dave wasn’t made of money. Twin beds, all perfectly respectable. When Dave got into his pyjamas Rose went over to the window and stared out at rainy lamp-light. When Rose got into hers he went and stood in the corridor with his back to the door, hands in his pockets, whistling, and knocked before he came back in. He slid the catch on the bathroom during his morning shower (ten minutes); she did likewise during hers (half an hour). He lay on his bed and watched TV news with the volume turned up so he couldn’t hear the muffled hiss and splash of the water, thought so hard about the implications of the latest fall in the Dow Jones he could probably have gotten a lectureship at LSE, because share prices left no room for concepts like steam, and wet skin, and tiny hungry sounds from deep in a pale throat tilted up under spray. When she came out dry and clean and neatly dressed, mopping at her hair with a fluffy periwinkle-blue hotel towel, he was lost in financial reverie, and the crotch of his jeans was flat as the Goddamn savannah. Nothing to see here, ma’am, move along.

Mercifully Rose knew the British for ‘liquor store’, so the first night they found one tucked down a back street and acquired two cartons of orange juice and a bottle of impossibly shitty vodka. They sat on their respective beds in the glow of the TV, shoes off, Dave’s ankles crossed, Rose’s knees hunched up, and drank screwdrivers out of the plastic cups they’d found shrink-wrapped on the bathroom shelf, and watched an indifferent slasher flick about some plucky teenagers who got lost on a hiking tour of Romania. One of the girls looked kind of like Jade, and Dave couldn’t help but flinch when she took a rusted iron railing straight through the face and out the back of her skull. Rose shot him a look.

“Strider. Surely, _surely_ , after all we’ve seen, you aren’t _squeamish_.”

“Hey, personally I’m proud of the fact that an eighteen-year-old girl’s head making a noise like someone stamped on a bag of chips still knows how to _move_ me, Eduardo. Ain’t my fault your horrorgland’s drier than Tutankhamen’s asshole.”

“And yet you can conversationally deploy the prospect of flaking, bituminous sphincters with perfect equipoise,” she said reflectively. “I suppose we all have our taboos.”

“Not the same,” he objected. “A dead guy’s ass is just a dead guy’s ass. Some poor kid getting her face stoved in like a piñata? That shit’s legitimately nasty.”

“You have real trouble with the idea of women getting hurt, don’t you?” she said. “I mean, physically injured.”

“Fuck yeah I do. Makes my skin crawl. Ask any dude, he’ll tell you the same.”

“Global statistics on sexual assault and domestic abuse beg to disagree with you there, _mon brave_.”

“Okay. Sorry. Ask any dude who’s not an _enormous douchebag_ and he’ll tell you the same. Better?”

“Mmm.” And she settled a little further down in her pillows and turned her attention back to the television.

The movie turned into adverts, which turned into a rerun of a shitty sitcom from the 90s, until the slow breathing from the next bed told him she’d fallen asleep. He rolled sideways to look at her. Stretched out like an Arundel countess, hands folded on her stomach, head propped up a little on the pillows, face blue-white and calm in the candle-flicker light of some guy in a bad shirt trying to explain to his wife what had happened to the lawnmower. Canned studio laughter surging like waves on stone. Only a strand of hair across Rose’s cheek, only the inching rise and fall of her breasts beneath the dress, between her and a tomb carving. Side by side in a crypt above London; a Knight and his lady. _A_ lady. _What will survive of us is love._

The room smelt of her and her dress was riding up on one thigh, and he wanted to jack off, but he’d shot himself in the foot with all the church imagery, and there was always the chance she’d wake up. Idle notions of what she might _do_ if she woke up and found him engaged in the solitary vice only made matters worse. _For Heaven’s sake, Strider. This obsessive self-reliance is both inelegant and insulting. Let me help you with that._ In the end he wriggled out of his jeans, pulled the duvet up round his shoulders, and thought very hard about the FTSE 100 until he passed out.

* * *

The next day they took their hangovers to the British Museum. Rose, tetchy over the muesli and Earl Grey, perked up the minute she saw her first giant impassive stone head. Half an hour later and he had officially never seen her this happy. Dave knew, on an academic level, that he didn’t give a shit about any of this stuff, but it was hard not to when she was staring at some chunk of old carved rock like it was a pin-up, or telling him about Byzantine iconography with what sounded dangerously like _eagerness_. Every time they turned a corner her eyes lit up at some new vase or sarcophagus. She read out the inscriptions and relished every word, told him little stories about emperors who’d gone mad and dressed up as animals, or channelled all their kingdom’s resources into building themselves preposterously lavish fuck-palaces on remote islands before dying alone of the clap, still mumbling about immortality. She seemed to be on first-name terms with the gods of ten different pantheons; dropped them in conversation like they were friends in foreign countries she talked to on the Internet. Something was badly wrong with his stomach, and it wasn’t the vodka’s fault.

In one gallery they found a statue of a warrior youth, life-size, a cloak draped over one shoulder, marble eyes fixed on something far away no-one else had ever seen. For some reason there didn’t seem to be a sign or a label for it. Dave stared at it critically.

“This dude’s pretty cool,” he said. “He looks like a badass. Even with no Goddamn pants on.”

“He’s extraordinary,” she agreed. “Look at the way he’s standing, his weight on his left foot like that, and the tension in the muscles is perfect. It’s very sophisticated work. I wonder how old it is?”

“Eighteen hundred years, give or take,” said Dave, reflexively, and stopped. Rose swivelled to stare at him. _Shit._

“So you _did_ keep some of it,” she said softly. “I wondered.”

He shrugged. “Not much. I’m not gonna be catching the time train to ancient Rome any time soon, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“But you can – what, feel it? That’s incredible.”

“Yeah. It’s hard to explain, it’s like – like stuff has this _weight_ , somehow. Been like this for years, but I’m noticing it more ever since we landed. I guess in Texas it don’t trouble me much, but everything here goes back to the year dot, and it’s – it’s _heavy_. That’s the only fucking way I can say it. I reckon time sticks to things, or some shit? I feel the weight, and I know how long it’s been around.”

“How precise is it?” She’d stepped a little closer to him, lowered her voice. Her eyes were fixed on his and it made him suddenly uncomfortable.

“Well, I can’t give you date and time. But I can usually get the decade. This dude’s maybe 220, 230 AD? It’s like when you eat Chinese food, or something, and you just know it’s got aniseed in it or whatever without having to think about it. Weird as Hell, I’m telling you. This whole place is actually kind of getting to me, it’s all so fucking old, I feel like TZ in a perfume shop – ” and he tailed off, flapped a hand helplessly by his side, looked back at the stone youth and his blind, ancient stare.

“Come on,” said Rose, and kept walking. He followed. “I can’t say I’m exactly surprised. You know Jade still moves around sometimes?”

“Serious?”

“Mmm. John confided in me. Bless him, he was really worried. He kept coming downstairs in the morning and finding her fast asleep on the living-room carpet, or the kitchen counter, or the front lawn. At first he thought she was sleepwalking, but then one morning she woke up on the roof. It doesn’t happen that often, and she never goes far, but being John he’s terrified she’s going to apparate inside a passing garbage truck, or something equally unlikely.”

“Hnh. What about you? You kept any of your box of tricks?”

“It’s hard to say. Light was always the most numinous and ill-defined of the power sets. I wish I’d had more chance to discuss it with Vriska.” She stopped again to stare up at a vast marble relief across which draped figures processed serenely. “I feel more like taking risks, these days, certainly. But that could be due to any number of things.”

“Like coming out the other side of the fucking Apocalypse.”

“Exactly. Or selling my soul to the cover of _Weird Tales_ and emerging with nothing more than a few picturesque scars on my heart to break the ice at parties.”

“Or watching John Egbert curb stomp the heat death of the Universe with a hammer designed by a gay clown. Big blue sock on his head and ‘One Winged Angel’ on the soundtrack.”

“Or kissing the fingers of the only woman I’ve ever loved, half a second before all creation came down between us like a pair of dusty velvet curtains and my final line got lost in the applause.”

They stood side by side, shoulders almost touching, gazing up at the priests and heroes with their bedsheet togas and their expressions of placid certainty. The fuckers looked so sure of their own permanence it made him want to fetch a power drill.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “I can see how some of that shit might make a girl a little crazy.”

She turned to look at him again, standing close, and pressed the back of her pale knuckles to the back of his where his hand hung by his side, twining their fingertips slightly together.

“It could make a boy a little crazy, too,” she said quietly, “if he let it.”

His throat hurt, and the only thing he’d ever wanted to do was get hold of her, pull her in, bury his face in her. To Hell with the sex. There’d be plenty of time for sex when he stopped crying.

“Rose, please. I’m a Strider. We don’t _get_ crazy. We go, ‘huh’.”

“Surely on occasion you permit yourself a murmured ‘ _damn_ ’?” The way she smeared the vowel out to spoof his accent would have been funny if it hadn’t been low and gorgeous and bitten at his gut like woodsmoke.

“Well, yeah. But only if the situation really calls for it. We don’t break that shit out for any old end of the world.”

She squeezed his fingers quickly with hers, then tugged her hand free. They walked on in silence down the gallery. A party of tourists swirled round and past them, chattering.

“I should hire you out to history faculties across the land,” she said, after a while. “I’d make a killing.”

He did his best to look wounded. “You’d do that? Pimp out your very own ectobro to a bunch of old white guys in tweed? They’d keep me in a _cage_.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Put you on a leash, I shouldn’t wonder. Strider the Radiocarbon Dog. Hurry up, boy, only another hundred manuscripts to snuffle and then you can have your bowl of reconstituted cow brain.”

“I may be a burnt-out Hero of Time but I still got my dignity. I need to roam free across the meadows, Rose, wind in my hair, hoovering up green rupees I’m gonna lose at the end of the third day anyway ‘cause I always forget to put them in the fucking bank.”

“You’re right. I can’t go through with it. You and your magical time nose are an abomination in the sight of God, but damn it, you’re _my_ abomination.” She smiled up at him suddenly and looped her arm through his. “Come on, let’s go and work out how old the cafeteria sandwiches are.”


	2. no comfort like that

Three days’ heavyweight tourism later they were sitting in a coffee shop off the Tottenham Court Road, recovering from an exhausting trip to the Trocadero. Rose had beaten the machine’s high score on _Dancing Stage Euromix 2_ (“How the fuck,” he had said in genuine horror as she fed ‘RLX’ into the top spot of the table with an expression of quiet and slightly flushed triumph, “does _anyone_ know ‘5, 6, 7, 8’ that well?”). Dave had been mistaken by a bunch of nerds for a John Constantine cosplayer (“Well,” she had told him when he stopped for breath mid-rant, “if you _will_ insist on walking around London in a trenchcoat looking blond and moody and in need of a shave...”). She’d only finally calmed him down by buying him a replica sonic screwdriver with flashing lights and Authentic Sound Effects!; as she pressed it into his hand she’d told him solemnly, “You have to promise not to leave me on a beach in Norway,” and he had promised, cross his hearts. Now it was nearly half four in the afternoon and they were either side of a chrome-topped table with lattés and gooey carrot cake, Dave watching shoppers scurry past the windows under streaming umbrellas, Rose chasing up obscure churches in the guidebook.

“Last night,” he said. “What d’you want to do with it?”

She tilted her head, mopped cake crumbs from the plate with the edge of one finger and sucked on it thoughtfully.

“I want to go out for dinner,” she said.

“Awesome. There’s a Burger King a block from the hotel.”

“ _No_ , Dave. I want to go out for dinner _properly_. I’m going to put on make-up, and you’re going to wear a jacket, because I know you packed one, and you’re going to pull my chair out so I can sit down, and I’m not going to spend the rest of the night luxuriating in the delightful prickly sensation that I’ve moisturised with hot fat and washed my hair in salt. We’re going to order _wine_ , Dave. We will be polite and civilised and urbane, and discuss French literature, and our jokes will be in the best possible taste, and at no point in the evening will you swig Cabernet Sauvignon straight from the bottle and disgrace yourself by offering to show the waitress your halfblade abstratus. I may have a _starter_.”

“Okay, the halfblade crack was completely uncalled-for.”

“I mean it, Strider. Do you see the steely glint in my eyes? Tomorrow we’re going back to America, and you’re going back to slouching around in your boxers and playing _Clipping Error 2: Polygon What Polygon_ and trying to avoid red things – no, I’m still talking, shush – and I’m going back to wandering down endless hallways like the heroine of a bad Gothic novella and self-medicating with Debussy and Tanqueray. I want to play at being grown-ups for an evening. For the first time in our ironic little lives, we are going to take ourselves seriously.”

* * *

In the event, he doesn’t manage to pull her chair out for her, because the waiter gets there first. Rose bestows a dazzling smile on the man while Dave stands doing his best to look like it’s cool, he can delegate the small stuff to the menials. Just remember who she’s going home with, buddy. If by ‘home’ you mean a hotel room and separate beds. The waiter doesn’t need to know that, though. Then he comes and pulls Dave’s chair out too, which leaves Dave feeling flustered and faintly emasculated.

Thirty seconds later he’s back with a sort of red leather folder which he proffers wordlessly to Dave. Dave nods, like _what took you so long_ , and flips it open to find it’s the wine list. His combat senses come on full alert; adrenaline fibre-optics ripple up his spine and his right hand clutches instinctively for an edged weapon. He’s well aware Rose is waiting for this part. A quick scan confirms what he already knew: every single bottle is named in French, except the ones that are named in Italian, and a couple of lonely Germans among the whites. Dave Strider is not drinking white wine, no way José, Terezi would never forgive him wherever she is, so he turns back to the reds.

The waiter waits. He does it well, almost professionally. Rose is watching.

The easy way out of this would be to ask for a minute to decide, solicit Rose’s opinion, and somehow con her into pronouncing the one she wants so he has something to copy. But this game has _rules_ , and Dave plays by the rules even when it’s not his game. The fact that there’s only one wine list, and Dave is holding it, is because it’s assumed that he’s a gentleman, and won’t want to trouble his companion with anything as inelegant as prices. A _really_ fancy restaurant, he knows, wouldn’t even _print_ the prices, because if you’re worried about how much the wine costs then what the fuck are you doing eating here, get your impecunious ass back to the soup kitchen. Showing Rose the wine list will demonstrate to her, the waiter, and probably everyone else in the Greater London administrative area that he is out of his depth. But if he tries to say _Le Haut Médoc de Giscours_ or _Savigny-lés-Beaune Vielles Vignes_ , it’s going to be like Iwo fucking Jima in here. Hundreds of people will die, and the survivors will wake cold and screaming in the night for years to come.

Then he has the brainwave. The way to win any game is turn the rules _against_ it.

He twitches his head to summon the waiter closer. The man bends down attentively, and Dave turns the menu, careful to keep it shielded from Rose, and taps with a finger, once. Then he gives the waiter the best Significant Look he can muster without taking off the shades.

The waiter straightens up and eyes Dave with a new respect. He bows slightly, reclaims the wine list, and evaporates. Dave, as the kind of _Brideshead Revisited_ asshole who clearly knows a lot about wine, wants to _surprise_ the lady. _Here we go, my dear – an impetuous little vintage, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption_. Critical fucking hit, max damage, and it’s Smooth-type, which Lalondes are weak against. She gives him a tiny smile. Dave feels the quick jolt as he levels up, and decides on a whim to pour all the points straight into Charisma; Wisdom’s always been his dump stat, and he hasn’t used his Strength in years.

“So,” he says, leaning back in his chair, “read any good French literature recently?”

* * *

After dinner they go for a walk.

“All things considered, that meal was an extremely sound fiscal investment,” she says, “as I will never need to eat again.”

“You _devastated_ that steak. Shit was like the Old Testament, but with more peppercorn sauce. Wasn’t even enough left to scrape into a shoebox and send home to its grieving wife and kids.”

“Oh dear,” she says contritely. “Have I appalled your sensibilities? Should I have picked delicately at a mung-bean _biryani_ and refused dessert?”

“What? Fuck, no, I like a girl who knows what food’s for. All this dicking around with half portions and slimline tonic and lo-cal mayonnaise is just insipid. You get your half a cow on with my personal blessing, kid.”

“I would subject this discovery to merciless psychoanalysis, but I’m too full of tiramisu.”

“Couldn’t help but notice said steak was so rare they had to tie it to the plate.”

“Mmm. A kiss blown with bloodied lips in the general direction of infinity, I suppose. Speaking of which – ” she stops, pivots to face him and catches at his lapels; he realises with slow astonishment that she’s _drunk_ , then realises he is too – “I haven’t seen you wear red in quite a while.”

He looks down at himself. “Yeah. Bought this jacket like two years ago, it’s been in the wardrobe ever since.”

“Why now?” she asks, and doesn’t let go.

“I have no fucking idea.”

“Dave – ”

“No, I mean it! I’m not smokescreening, I actually don’t know why I packed the damn thing. I just looked at it on the hanger and thought, huh, let’s take that.”

“It looks good on you,” she says softly. “Red’s always been your colour. I’m glad to see it back.”

He can’t help himself; self-control is slipping away on the tide. He drags her against him with one arm, there under the streetlight, and she flattens her hands to his chest and gazes at him cool and teasing. Her body is warm, her face is ghostly pale, her lips are dark and slightly parted, and he doesn’t _want_ to kiss her, he _needs_ to – it’s where the whole vacation’s been heading, the whole of the last half decade, it’s so obviously the next thing to do that he doesn’t trust it; because when he was a kid Dave Strider specialised in doing the inevitable, and all it ever got him was hurt or killed. So he bites the inside of his cheek and reaches up, instead, and plucks his shades away from his face. Then he looks into her eyes.

For the next six seconds literally everything in the Universe makes perfect sense.

When he lets her go and staggers away he’s breathing like he just took down a denizen and his skin feels flushed and tingly, like he drank a lot of coffee while it was still really too hot for comfort. Rose is staring at him almost wildly, and he senses that for once in her life she has no more idea what just happened than he does, and he guesses maybe that’s a good thing.

On the walk back to the hotel she slips her hand into his and he just squeezes it tight and says nothing.

In the room they’re reaching for each other before the door even closes. He gets both arms round her this time, but it’s still not a kiss, not yet; she nuzzles into his neck and makes a little noise that’s almost a sob, he presses his mouth into her hair and closes his eyes for second. She tugs away again, almost, not far enough to break his hold but far enough to look at him, and whispers – the closest to desperate he’s ever heard her – “Dave, what are we _doing_?”

“Taking ourselves seriously,” he says, and kisses her.

It’s his first kiss in six years, and it’s different. She has none of Terezi’s ferocity; she doesn’t bite his mouth ‘til it bleeds, or sink sharp nails into the flesh of his arms, or pull away and do that low throaty chuckle that used to make his dick and his neck-hairs stiffen all at once. She’s soft, and hungry, and she twines herself against him as if she’s trying to kiss him with her whole body. It’s not a kiss that says _fight me, coolkid!_ with a grin like a thousand sexy knives. It’s a kiss that says _for God’s sake let’s just stop running_.

So they do.

* * *

Pushing the beds together would have been a waste of time, so when they’re both exhausted Rose ends up lying more or less on top of him, tousled head on his bare chest, while he strokes one hand idly up and down her spine. They stay like that for a while, breathing in the darkness; the rain gusts and spatters against the gleaming square of the window, and the shadows on the ceiling ripple and tremble. Every so often a car sweeps past somewhere below.

Dave reaches out with his free arm and jostles open the drawer of his bedside cabinet, cursing softly when it catches. He shoves his hand in and fumbles blindly among spare change and ticket stubs. Rose takes the opportunity to plant little kisses all along the line of his collarbone. Finally he finds what he’s looking for.

“Got you a present,” he says.

She props her chin on his sternum and eyes him sleepily from under her fringe. “Unorthodox. You’re supposed to _use_ the presents to lure me into bed in the first place.”

“Yeah, I know. I buy you some Louboutin heels and a bottle of Cristal, you come back to my crib and we freak it buck wild ‘til the break of dawn.”

“You’re also meant to stipulate that I bring a friend, since your ceaseless, ravening sexual appetite will settle for nothing less.”

“Look, if you rock up with John Egbert in a push-up bra the deal’s off, okay,” he says severely. She buries the laugh in his shoulder. He swings the other arm back into bed and places the little box on his chest where she can see it. “So I heard you like ironically sentimental gifts.”

She wakes up, goes watchful again, props herself up on her elbows. He enjoys the view while she carefully peels open the lid of the box and takes out the ring – a plain silver band, no stone.

“Dave?”

“Whoa, no, don’t go falling down all that symbolism. I’d have got it you on a necklace, or a coffee mug or something, but this was the only way they had it. I found it in the gift-shop for that weird-ass little museum we went to on Tuesday.”

She’s noticed the writing on the inner surface, is tilting the ring and peering at it to try and make out the letters in the glow from the window.

“It says – shit, what was it? – _animae dimidium meae_ ,” he puts in helpfully. “Means – ”

“ _Half my own soul_ ,” she murmurs, and her voice has gone funny all of a sudden. “I know what it _means_ , Dave, you fucking _idiot_ – ” and she starts to cry.

“Boy, that went kind of wrong,” he says. “I can take it back, I’ve still got the receipt.”

“Don’t you dare,” she says fiercely, her tear-stained face snapping up to glare at him. “I will never take this off.”

“Well, I mean, it’s cool, you can take it off in the shower and stuff – ”

She shakes her head. “Never.”

He sighs. “Look, I realise I ain’t what you might call a hot proposition, Lalonde. Few thousand miles on the clock, one not-very-careful owner. Okay, one certifiably lunatic owner who drove me into walls to watch my fenders crumple and cackled like a maniac when bits dropped off. You’re a classy lady, you deserve a guy with more to offer than ex issues, shitty time powers that don’t work right, and the sickest fucking beats anywhere in paradox space – ”

“ _Dave,_ ” she says. “You have absolutely no idea how I’ve survived the last six years in that Godawful house, do you?”

“Clean living,” he says, “and talking to the cat.”

“No, you impossible asshole. I lied about those picturesque scars. The Furthest Ring doesn’t let you go that easily. Every time it got really bad – every time I couldn’t get away from the whispers and the scrabbling in the walls, every time I looked in the mirror and the girl in it tried to tear my throat out, every time I just wanted to let her burn down the world and scream in the ashes because what did I care about all these stupid _people_ anyway – I thought about _you_.”

He looks at her. She looks back steadily.

“When we first got home I kept a dream diary. I thought it might help me... straighten things out, you know? You can solve most problems if you write them down. A month later I had what looked like a first draft for the _Necronomicon_ before Alhazred found a decent editor, and the diary was starting to tell me things I’d never heard before. I’d turn to a blank page and someone else’s handwriting would be all over it, neat and cramped, and I don’t think anyone on Earth makes ink that colour. One night I left the book downstairs in the living room and when I woke up it was back in its usual place by my bed.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Quite. So I burnt it in a trashcan in the garden, and I hope I never have to see anything else like the shapes I saw in the smoke. And then I replaced it on my nightstand with a frame I bought specially and that picture of you and me – the one John took the first time we all went to visit Jade, remember?”

“Oh, fuck, not that stupid one with the ice-cream – ”

“Yes,” she says firmly, “the stupid one with the ice-cream.”

“Did the dreams get any better?”

“No. But the waking up did.”

He reaches out to press a palm against her cheek. She doesn’t blink.

“I’ve listened to every single one of your stupid remixes so often I know them by heart. I print out all our Pesterlogs and keep them in a special red folder so I can read them just before I go to bed. I’ve kissed my _pillow_ pretending it was you, Dave, and I thought I’d grown out of that when I was twelve.”

“Good kisser?”

“A little unresponsive. I’ve decided I prefer the real thing.”

He blows out a breath. “Rose, fuck. I had no idea it was that bad.”

“Not the point. I’m not bidding for your sympathy. I’m just saying, you think _you’re_ damaged goods. I’m,” she says, and swallows. “I’m not a very easy person to love, Dave.”

“You reckon?” he says. “I been managing just fine for years.”

* * *

TG: sup harley  
TG: hows tricks   
GG: dave!!!! :D  
GG: how are you??  
GG: and rose????  
GG: how was london??????    
TG: woah shit keep an eye on those question marks  
TG: looks like the little fuckers are breeding  
TG: might wanna turn the hose on them   
GG: daaaaaaaaave tell me about london already, jeez!!! :p   
TG: nah it was cool  
TG: rained a lot  
TG: like  
TG: pretty much all the fucking time actually  
TG: bought you both some truly unspeakable souvenirs  
TG: hope youre feeling anaemic cause youre about to get a massive infusion of irony  
TG: but anyway thats not the point  
TG: the point is  
TG: when you see egbert  
TG: tell him he was right  
TG: but you know try and tell him in a kinda grudging reluctant way like i would  
TG: dont like hug him or squeal or any of that stuff   
GG: right about what?  
GG: hes in the garden, i can go get him if you want!    
TG: nah  
TG: look  
TG: shit  
TG: rose and i talked stuff over  
TG: decided living alone is basically for assholes  
TG: so were gonna get a place together   
GG: omg dave thats amazing!!!! :D  
GG: im soooo happy for you, i hated thinking of you both on your own all the time <3 <3 <3  
GG: but you know john and i have loads of space here, you could both move in with us if you wanted!  
GG: im sure he wouldnt mind cooking for four hehehe ;)    
TG: uh  
TG: yeah  
TG: i think were probably going to start off just the two of us  
TG: been in solitary confinement for a while now you know  
TG: dont wanna rush the transition   
GG: yes of course, that makes sense  
GG: but the offers always there! <3   
TG: thats cool  
TG: thanks jade  
TG: anyway gotta go  
TG: i promised rose we could watch a movie


End file.
